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Update: Mangalyaan's Main Engine Test Fired, Maven In Orbit

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-systems-are-go dept.

William Robinson writes Before the spacecraft is scheduled to enter Mars orbit, Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) scientists reignited the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft's main engine for four seconds as a trial. The liquid apogee motor (LAM) engine has been idle for about 300 days since the spacecraft left the Earth's orbit on a Martian trajectory on December 1, 2013. The short-duration test was to ensure that the engine is in good shape for the 24-minute crucial maneuver on Wednesday." In other Mars mission updates, NASA's Maven spacecraft arrived at Mars late Sunday after a 442 million-mile journey that began nearly a year ago.

3 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. I hadn't heard of Mangalyaan by i+kan+reed · · Score: 1, Informative

    The wikipedia page for those as ignorant as I am. It's apparently almost entirely a proof of concept that India's space agency can manage an interplanetary orbiter. The mission's main profile seems to be "get into stable geocentric orbit around mars".

    I'm sure the atmospheric monitoring tools are scientifically useful to someone though.

    1. Re:I hadn't heard of Mangalyaan by kaiser423 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, it's very interesting. The insertion burn is also going to be very interesting. For those that don't know, the Indian Space Agency has been building a bigger rocket for a while, but its been beset with delays. This orbiter was originally supposed to go on their bigger rocket, but it's not very reliable right now.

      So, they put it on one of their smaller rockets. The net of this is that the orbiter itself had to use up most of its fuel just escaping Earth's orbit, leaving very, very little for the actual insertion burn. They're going to end up in a highly eccentric orbit due to not having enough fuel to create a nice circular one. This means that a lot of the time, they're going to be very far from Mars, but when they get close they'll actually dip pretty darn close and those atmospheric sensors will be actually fairly deep into the atmosphere. Sadly, this also means that the orbit isn't as stable as they would like and will degenerate fairly quickly. But, all in all that's quite impressive! If they end up getting a bit more thrust out than planned, they make be able to circularize it a bit more....

    2. Re:I hadn't heard of Mangalyaan by kaiser423 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I forgot to mention comet Siding Spring is making a close approach by MArs, which is expeted to up to *double* the amount of hydrogen in Mar's upper atmosphere and increase drag from 1.4x to 40x normal drag. If it ends up bad, it could drastically shorten Mangalyaan's life and fairly considerably shorten the life of all other orbiters around Mars. That should happen around October 19th. But we might get to see some good pictures of the comet from Mars as well as (although rated as a minimal increase, with minor risk to spacecraft) a nice meteor shower around Mars.